Very entertaining Stranger Things - as long as you can willingly suspend your disbelief

Half-way through the first season of The Duffer Brothers' Netflix drama, Stranger Things, and finding it surprisingly entertaining. Yes, it requires and enormous suspension of disbelief - as the story involves some kind of conspiracy centering on the U.S. Department of Energy facility in Indiana, with scientists using a young girl ( the daughter of the lead scientist) as a subject for mind-control experiments that someone get way out of control and produce a blob-alien all-devouring monster that is attacking children in the small Indiana town, got it? You really don't have to, as I find the sci-fi-conspiracy elements uninteresting in and of themselves - but they're a vehicle for the Duffers to get at the personalities of the town, in particular the children in the schools whose friends are abducted and who pledge to find them. Also, Winona Ryder is very good as the mom of the first abducted child and who believes he is communicating with her via electric currents. As in so many scifi movies, everyone thinks she is delusional, suffering from a serious breakdown, while of course her only problem is that she's in a movie about the paranormal - we get it, and we feel for her in her misery. The Duffers do a nice job w/ the 1980s period setting - the topical details and the style all seem right, and give the series a little bit of a creepy flavor - a la Blue Velvet, perhaps. The greatest influence, though, is the huge debt to ET (as M pointed out): the adult scientists cruel and lacking in understanding, the sensitive lost alien (in this case the girl who's been the subject of the experiments), the contrast between the dramatic and unusual plot and the mundane domestic life of the town and of the time - kids riding around on bikes in a seemingly safe community, w/ the unknown lurking around the bend.